In other countries, especially in sports like football (soccer), teams from major urban centers tend to dominate leagues and championships, often because of higher financial resources. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case in the United States, where titles in major sports like basketball and American football are more evenly spread among cities or regions. For example, about football in other countries, it seems almost impossible for a team located in a city similar to where the Green Bay Packers are located to be relevant. Just look at the history of the Premier League, Bundesliga, or La Liga.Perhaps the question is more about why titles are more evenly distributed among regions in these sports in United States, comparing with other countries.
In: Other
Drafts and salary caps. In Europe, teams develop their own talent. Any player you see on a European pitch was affiliated with a team by the age of eight. Wealthier teams have stronger academies which develop stronger talent, and those that don’t have strong academies are simply able to buy talent. There is no draft that distributes talent amongst the clubs. Either you spend a decade developing an 8-year-old into a pro, or you have to buy the finished product from another club. There is also no salary cap, so wealthier clubs can simply outspend poorer clubs.
The main reason why North american teams adopted the dispositions everyone else talked about, is because there is no promotion/relegation to another league. With a guaranteed stability between the teams, they have incentives to even out the playing field, and the larger the leagues grow, the less weight the top 2-3 revenue teams have to stop this process. Now even the big markets don’t mind so much anymore, because they know they’ll keep making mad money anyway, and they are forced to spend less for it.
The draft means even bad seasons will have the fans invested in “a rebuild” and keep them spending on hype, and if sport success comes the revenues will be through the roof, without the need to spend more than everyone else.
American sports leagues are set up very differently from European ones:
1. Players can only enter the league via a draft, and the worst teams get to select first every year and get the best new players.
2. There are strict salary caps. Some leagues don’t allow teams to go over at all, while others impose strict penalties. So beyond a certain point having more money doesn’t help.
These, plus many more minor rules, ensure that there is parity in the league, and no team stays bad for too long.
It is worth noting though that despite all of this teams from bigger cities do tend to win more in general than smaller ones even in America. It just isn’t as blatant as in European leagues where the same 2-3 teams will just dominate forever.
do they have draft for football(soccer) leagues?
Latest Answers